I couldn’t include everything in yesterday’s post on how we use whiteboard desks, so today’s post will focus on two key parts of the whiteboard desk project: Sharing with other students and archiving for portfolios and later use.

Sharing with others:

A student has written an incredible poem and I want to share it with the class. The student could read it, but then others wouldn’t be able to see the picture. I could take a photo and upload it, but that involves a lot of time, time that is valuable in the classroom. The solution? Right now that solution is eyeTransport (link) for iOS devices, as it’s FREE.

You need to have two iOS devices for this, which is what I am lucky enough to have through my own purchase (iPhone) and through a Silicon Valley CUE grant (iPad 2). I have the iPad 2 connected to the classroom LCD projector and carry the iPhone in my hand. Once I launch eyeTransport, I see a screen like the one below and connect to the iPad via Bluetooth.

eyeTransport connect screen

Once I’m connected, whatever the camera on my iPhone sees is what everyone see on the whiteboard. Below you will see the original image and what the students see through the iPad/projector.

The original image from the iPhone

Image received by iPad through eyeTransport

As you can see, the quality is not great, but it’s good enough to be able to read and see the broad strokes a whiteboard marker would make on the desk. Probably not good enough to share work done in light pencil, but with the thick whiteboard markers there is little worry about that. Now every child gets to see that wonderful poem without having to try to gather everyone around one table group (one of the worst ideas… I’d rather hold the desk up in front of the classroom and dump all the contents of the desk on the ground).

Archiving:

Now, how to archive? Easy enough to do with any sort of digital camera and Evernote. Easier with an Android or iOS device because you can upload directly to Evernote, but either way, pretty simple. If you don’t know what Evernote is or how it works, I’d highly recommend taking a look at their site (link). I take the photo of the student work with my iPhone, upload to Evernote, and tag with the student’s name and any other details I might want to remember about this photo. For the poem, I’d probably tag it with the name, title, and “poem”.

Evernote also has the ability to search a photo for text, so if I wanted to find an exemplar piece of student work, I could just type in the keywords. For instance, if I wanted to find a student who tried starting a summary with “First,” I could type that word into Evernote and it would provide those examples, such as the one below.

Evernote search for summaries beginning with”first”

I hope all of this is helpful for anyone thinking about implementing whiteboard desks or even just wondering how they can archive student work online. Good luck!